Friday, January 19, 2007

More on religion and crime: I suspected that the correlation between not having a religion and being arrested might be due to gender: men are both less religious and more criminal than women. But this is what I found:

Percent ever arrested:

White menProtestant 15.9Catholic 19.2Jewish 9.7No religion 32.5

White womenProtestant 3.6Catholic 3.9Jewish 3.1No religion 11.8

Black menProtestant 25.4Catholic 37.3No religion 43.5

Black womenProtestant 7.0Catholic 8.2No religion 6.5

Even controlling for gender, people with a religion tend to be less criminal. And according to these numbers, religion is more important than race: non-affiliated whites have higher arrest rates than Protestant blacks (both men and women). The numbers, however, do show that race matters. I combined Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino Americans to make a sufficiently large group, and only one out of 55 had ever been arrested: a Catholic Filipino. The 10 Asians with no religion had zero arrests. It's interesting how 82% of this sample of Asians report a religion: clearly Asian Americans are more religious than people in the old country.

By the way, I looked to see why black Catholics are so much more criminal than Protestants. You can see in the numbers above that the difference is concentrated among men. The only factor I could find is that Black Catholics are a significantly younger group: more of them grew up during the era of high crime. I suppose they are younger because as Steve Sailer wrote, more black kids are being sent to parochial schools, and some convert. Steve also thought (as did I) that they might be concentrated in New Orleans, a crime-ridden city. But the largest share of them (according to the GSS) live in the mid-Atlantic division--NJ, NY, and PA.

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it depends on how this data was taken and what samples of people were used to collect this data. If you call people and ask them if they ever commited a crime, most people would be hesitant to admit.

I personally believe this data is false, because there are higher crime rates in poor parts of town, and the higher crime rates are due to the corruption of the school system, and less education about evolution and science would lead to people to be easily influenced by religion.

also, not all atheists are the same. there are some without morals and an education, and there are some with morals and an education. Same with religion, some people strictly abide to the morals of the bible, and some are crazy conservatives that read the bible literarlly and set forth to kill everyone who is not affiliated with their god.as Steven Weinberg said: "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."

Anon: Weinberg is full of crap because he didn't finish the sentence. For good people to do evil things, they need religion or a government or an ideology or a revolution or a tribe or a gang or a mob or, etc, etc.

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"Man is an enigma. This enigma must be solved, and if you spend all your life at it, don't say you have wasted your time; I occupy myself with this enigma because I wish to be a man."
~Fyodor Dostoevsky